1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a content playback unit capable of playing back contents on a server or of the unit itself and an electronic device incorporating the same, and in particular, it relates to dynamic alternation of a content playback schedule that is once drawn up.
2. Related Art
TV set are known in recent yeas which can play back multimedia contents using a video-on-demand (VOD) system via a network and a file system Here the contents include still images, moving images, and audio. Those TV sets generally manage the contents independently with tags such as file names, universally unique identifiers (UUIDs), and universal resource identifiers (URIs) that are unique IDs on a server or a file system.
However, although the tags indicative of contents are managed so as to be unique to each content, they have high redundancy because they have a large number of digits from the nature thereof and generally managed as character strings containing alphanumeric characters, and the correlation between the tags and the contents is not assured. Accordingly, in most of the TV sets, a list of titles indicative of the contents is displayed on the screens of the TV sets as the tags themselves or aliases, on which serial numbers or focuses are given for the purpose of convenience, thereby allowing selection of contents by numeral entry or a cursor key.
However, there is no relationship between the contents and the numerals on the menu, and the contents listed are treated in parallel. Accordingly, in order to view the displayed contents continuously, it is necessary to repeat the operations of displaying a content selection menu displaying a list of the contents every playback, selecting a content, and playing back the content. This results in low operability. For contents having no title information, the actual contents cannot be known even by a character-string menu-selection system, so that there is no reference for menu selection, which requires complicated key entry operation of repetition of selection, confirming contents by test playback, pause, and reselection, and repetitive transition between the menu and playback.
Well known examples for improvement include a system in which complicated contents are hierarchically organized in a folder, and the organized contents of the folder are treated collectively, and a system in which classified virtual “channels” are produced (e.g., JP-A-2001-326867).
However, the system of virtual “channels” has the problems that folder names and channels are needed by the classified numbers, that the way of classification and the relationship with the folder names or channel names must always be under consideration, and that it becomes more difficult to dynamically reorganize desired contents.